BIKE: Natural Gas (continued)

[rcbaker]

On 14 Feb 2004 at 12:47, Andrew Wimsatt wrote:

> Granted, natural gas may not be ideal for fueling vehicles.  However,
> the Houston Chronicle article mentions transport costs, storage, etc.
> 
> 
> http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/2399179
> 
> 

The  important fact remains that natural gas is likely to be much more 
expensive in the future and not very appropriate for cars. This because 
it is more bulky compared to gasoline plus it takes special cars and 
fueling infrastucture. World oil will peak within this decade, probably, 
long before this kind of national transition could happen. 

The stuff posted by Jeff Thorne on conversion of ethanol to hydrogen is 
not very important because the starting material, ethanol, takes more oil 
to produce than it gives back as energy. Why? Becuase it takes gas or 
diesel powered tractors to plant and harvest corn, plus natural gas to 
make the nitrogen fertilizer to get good yields, plus the corn mash has 
to be distilled, which involves bring a large amount of dilute alcohol to a 
boil. That is why all alcohol used as fuel has to be heavily government 
subsidized. 

Andrew ventures that natural gas can or could help supplement 
declining oil production in the future. True enough, but the real issue is 
to what degree, and in what time frame, and at what cost? 

The reason that large natural gas reserves still remain, although they 
are largely found in unstable parts of the world, is exactly because 
nobody wants to try to transport gas, unless they have to do, until and 
unless oil has become too expensive to use in its place. 

So what happens when world oil production peaks? It goes up sharply 
in price and causes the world to try to shift to now-cheaper "stranded" 
natural gas. I think natural gas at $5/1000 ft3 is now about as 
expensive or more expensive than oil per calorie of heat content. The 
only real advantage of the gas over oil is that its less polluting and is a 
better feedstock for some petrochemical uses. 

The fact that natural gas is cheaper to transport than it used to be 
means little if it is now five times more expensive than oil, rather than 
the previous ten times as expensive to transport. 

A vital issue in natural gas economics is what the future supply and 
demand will be once the alternative of cheap oil runs out. The answer is 
likely that it won't be nearly as cheap as expected because we will then 
be competing with the rest of the world for this new energy source 
under conditions in which the rest of the world is now trying to switch to 
gas too, and is thus is competing with us for limited supplies of LNG. 

At best natural gas is not a very good fuel, which is why only 
government subsidized vehicles like Cap Metro buses use it. Propane 
and butane are much more practical in terms of commuting radius, but 
demand would rapidly inclease these fuels too, if many vehicles were to 
shift.  

Anyone who posts on these topics should read "The Party's Over" by 
Richard Heinberg. Most humans, being the way they are, don't want to 
hear bad news and so they want to imagine all sort of magic techno-
fixes to what certainly appear to be insoluble engineering problems. 

NO alternative car fuels or batteries have the high power density to 
match gasoline, with the possible hypothetical exception of nuclear 
powered cars, which do not exist, however. 

Unfortunately, all our sprawling suburbs are designed to be used ONLY 
in conjunction with cheap, long-commuting radius gasoline powered 
vehicles and their related high energy density, gasoline-addictive 
infrastructure. 

The road lobby and all the political interests that surround them and 
influence Texas politics is so powerful in Texas that the Texas 
Transportation Commission that runs TxDOT will never admit that they 
are effectively destroying the economic future of Texas. 

They are doing this by their single-minded emphasis on building roads 
to the exclusion of other alternatives. When the inherent economic 
inefficiency of trying to keep up with suburban sprawl becomes 
unsustainable, they simply switch to deficit spending for toll roads that 
can never realisticly pay off their debts. 

The ears of the TTC are plugged up with money. Therefore the TTC is 
as unwilling to intelligently debate the impact of the approaching end of 
cheap oil.  Much as the vampire is unwilling to stare at the cross. Much 
as Bush would rather go to war for transparently phony reasons rather 
than admit that the real reason for the war is to achieve military 
dominance in a region that has 60% of the world's oil reserves, as wll 
as much of its natural gas. 

This policy of deliberate TTC denial -- this denial temporarily fattens the 
wallets of the bankers, developers, and land speculators who demand 
public handouts in the form of roads to suplement their sprawl 
development.  Things may not reach a crisis until their TTC terms are 
up in a few years. This at the expense of worsening the impact of the 
rapidly approaching day of reckoning when world oil production peaks 
and all fuel prices, including that of LNG, rise steeply in accord with the 
law of supply and demand.

-- Roger

The following link is especially important because it underlines the 
seriousness of the situation plus it shows that Cheney was secretly 
aware of the true seriousness of the energy crisis:

 http://www.currentconcerns.ch/archive/2004/01/20040118.php


And for more excellent background on the energy situation go to the Oil 
Depletion Analysis Center which archives lots of good articles:

http://www.odac-info.org/
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